– Abhiraj Malhotra, Co-founder, SchoolPad
The past few years have been a giant techno-bubble where virtually every problem, every pain point has an answer in technology. The education space is no different. It has witnessed a giant boom in edtech ventures, each offering its own technology-based solutions for problems faced by school managements.
School owners may have at some point felt the pressure to acquire a school management software, a need often arising from the belief that owning such software is a ticket to a tech-savvy future. This belief is further fueled by schools that have benefited from such software and the edtech industry, which believes that school management software is the need of the hour.
While there’s no denying the significance of school management software to most schools, it’s noteworthy that not all schools have similar needs. What is needed is a detailed, value-based assessment of the concerns and needs of school managements before arriving at a conclusion.
Distilled from our experience at SchoolPad, below are five essential questions that school owners must ask themselves before deciding on the software.
1. Have You Identified Your Key Problem Areas?
A School Management Software is a tool meant to help fix specific school-related problems. This means that you first need to identify your concerns, that your software must address. For example, your school may be facing fee collection issues, withdrawal mismanagement, or parents’ complaints about improper progress reports. If you are unable to fix these problems independently, it may be time for a software that will help you address these issues quickly and effectively.
2. What Is The Size of Your School?
Regardless of the complexity of the problems you may have identified, when it comes to making that critical decision about the need for a school management software, school size matters the most. If your school is small and you are facing the problems mentioned above, your school may well be able to fix them by effective strategy and freely available tools without investing in a dedicated management software.
3. Is Your Team Ready?
This is a critical question because school management software is data-driven, which means that all departments would need to routinely feed in data. Unless you have a team that is amenable to techintensive training and have one or two individuals to spare who can be dedicated to making the software implementation a success, it may not be the right time for you to opt for the software.
4. Are you ready for the mindset shift?
It is essential for school owners or principals to make a mindset shift from the orthodox pen and paper approach to a technology-driven approach when it comes to managing schoolrelated problems. Only when school managements have a technology driven mindset, can they convince their teams and other stakeholders to cooperate and build an authentic, technology-powered school.
5. What is your budget?
Even when your answer to all the above questions indicates that you are ready for a school management software, check your budget before you make the final call. If your budget doesn’t permit you to invest in highend software, you may find yourself stuck with a sub-optimal product or without proper service and support, which will eventually lead to a total loss of investment for your school. This checklist is merely a guideline to help you navigate an otherwise daunting decision-making process. Ultimately, while a good school management software can be path-breaking, the decision to imvest in it must be logical, well-thought out, based on your true needs and not prompted by industry sales, and also made at the right time per your specific requirements. Having worked with multiple schools in the past, we at SchoolPad assist our clients in making a proper, need-based analysis, when it comes to software acquisition. After all, only the right decision at the right time can make your journey into the world of school management software worth your time, money, and effort.
If this article has got you thinking about school management software, and you are curious to know more about how we at SchoolPad work with schools and help them manage their data and workflows more efficiently, please write to us at [email protected].
